“But in Tacitus’s version of events, the death is marked, too, by a surprising and self-conscious lacuna: Tacitus tells us that Seneca, his ‘eloquence persisting at each final moment, summon scribes are dictated a considerable amount to them’, but that he,Tacitus, will ‘refrain from adapting’ this material, since it has already been published. (As it happens, Seneca’s final thoughts, whatever they were, have not been preserved.) This most notorious death scene has an absence at its heart: the extraordinarily prolific and voluble philosopher-playwright, whose writings dwell so often on how best to face our final moments, speaks right up to the end, but in words we cannot hear. Tacitus’s suggestive omission silences Seneca, and claims a kind of authority over him. This adds to the nuanced exploration of control in the passage: Seneca’s control of his own departure, Nero’s of Seneca, and Tacitus’s as narrating author, of them both.”

(Victoria Moul, from “A long, enduring end,” review of James Ker’s The Deaths of Seneca, p. 13 in the 23 April 2010 Times Literary Supplement.)